Medical devices are frequently used to treat the anatomy of patients. Such devices can be permanently or semi-permanently implanted in the anatomy to provide treatment to the patient. Frequently, these devices, including stents, grafts, stent-grafts, filters, valves, occluders, markers, mapping devices, therapeutic agent delivery devices, prostheses, pumps, bandages, and other endoluminal and implantable devices, are inserted into the body at an insertion point and deployed to a treatment area using a catheter. Common types of expandable devices include stents and stent-grafts.
Expandable devices such as stents or stent-grafts are used in a variety of places in the human body to repair aneurysms and to support various anatomical lumens, such as blood vessels, respiratory ducts, gastrointestinal ducts, and the like. Expandable devices may have a reduced diameter when in a collapsed configuration, which can be expanded once located at the treatment site in the patient. Expandable devices may be constrained in the collapsed configuration to facilitate transport to the treatment site.
Although moving a medical device to a treatment area and deploying it for a localized medical treatment are common procedures today, fluoroscopy or other imaging techniques are typically needed to track the movement of the device to the treatment site and to track the progress of the deployment once located. One such example of imaging is X-ray fluoroscopy, which is used for real time imaging during the locating and deploying procedures. Although X-ray fluoroscopy provides excellent resolution, it has various practical limitations.
Therefore, new medical devices, systems and methods that allow real time indication of the progress of their deployment are desirable.